Top HIE vendors of 2014 named

Not all HIE products are created equal; some are more equal than others. At least that's according to the findings of a new Black Book Rankings report that names the top performing HIE vendors across five different categories.

"Private exchanges will continue to outpace public HIEs as organizations are exploring how they will effectively aggregate data to support their ACO efforts", said Doug Brown, managing partner of Black Book, in a news release. "Eventually, given meaningful use, the industry can expect to see connections between private and public exchanges emerging for the purpose of sharing public health data and to support the portability of medical records. But there is an obvious challenge of whether public, regional and state exchanges will still be around to connect to when that happens, or if these private exchanges and EHR vendors will instead connect stakeholders directly to a national exchange.”

By April 2013, hospital participation in a health information exchange was pegged at un underwhelming 30 percent, up from 14 percent back in 2008, according to a recent HIMSS Analytics report.

Getting those numbers up will involve addressing the current lack of standards, said David Whitlinger, executive director of the New York eHealth Collaborative, the organization that launched the Statewide Health Information Network of New York, in an interview with Healthcare IT News ths past month.

"That’s how we really are spending a lot of time and energy and money connecting together things that are not standard and getting the EHR data into HIEs is still a significant barrier," he said.

Out of the some 30 percent of hospitals and providers using HIE solutions, the top complaint came down to lack of product integration and interface.